Frederik Pohl & C M Kornbluth Search the Sky

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a loose shut. But the older women wore fitted
clothes.
The foreman-type led a grand procession through the door. Helena told Ross: "I guess you'd better
get in front of me in line. I go here " She slipped in deftly, and Ross understood a little more
of what went on here. The procession was in order of age.
He had determined to drift for a day or two not that he seemed to have much choice. The Franklin
Foundation, supposedly having endured a good many years, would last another week while he explored
the baffling mores of this place and found out how to circumvent them and find his way to the
keepers of F-T-L on this world. Nobody would go anywhere with his own ship not without first
running up a setting for the Wesley Drive!
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The line filed into a factory whose like Ross had never before seen. He had a fair knowledge of
and eye for industrial processes; it was clear that the place was an electric-cable works. But why
was the concrete floor dangerously cracked and sloppily patched? Why was the big enameling oven
rumbling and stinking? Why were the rolling mills in a far corner unsupplied with guards and big,
easy-to-hit emergency cutoffs? Why was the light bad and the air full of lint? Why did the
pickling tank fume and make the workers around it cough hackingly? Most pointed of all, why did
the dye vats to which Helena led him stink and slop over?
There were grimy signs everywhere, including the isolated bay where braiding cord was dyed the
standard code colors. The signs said things like: AGE IS A PRIVILEGE AND NOT A RIGHT. AGE MUST BE
EARNED BY WORK. GRATITUDE IS THE INDEX OF YOUR PROGRESS TO MATURITY.
Helena said girlishly as she took his arm and hooked him out of the moving line: "Here's
Stinkville. Believe me,
I'm not going to talk back again. After all, one's maturity is measured by one's acceptance of
one's environment, isn't it?"
"Yeah," said Ross. "Listen, Helena, have you ever heard of a place called the Franklin
Foundation?"
"No," she said. "First you climb up here golly! I don't even know your name."
"Ross."
"All right, Ross. First you climb up here and make sure the yarn's running over the rollers right;
sometimes it gets twisted around and then it breaks. Then you take one of the thermometers from
the wall and you check the vat temperature. It says right on the thermometers what it should be
for the different colors. If it's off you turn that gas tap up or down, just a little. Then you
check the wringer rolls where the yarn comes out. Watch your fingers when you do! The yarn comes
in different thicknesses on the same thread so you have to adjust the wringer rolls so too much
dye doesn't get squeezed out. You can tell by the color; it shouldn't be lighter after it goes
through the rolls. But the yarn shouldn't come through sloppy and drip dye on the floor while it
travels to the bobbin "
There was some more, equally uncomplicated. He took the yellow and green vats; she took the red
and blue. They had worked in the choking stench and heat for perhaps three hours before Ross
finished one temperature check and descended to adjust a gas tap. He found Helena, spent and
gasping, on the floor, hidden from the rest of the shop by the bulky tanks.
"Heat knock you out?" he asked briskly. "Don't try to talk. I'll tote you over by the wall away
from the burners. Maybe we'll catch a little breeze from the windows there." She nodded weakly.
He picked her up without too much trouble, carried her three yards or so to the wall, still
isolated from the rest of the shop. She was ripely curved under that loose shirt, he learned. He
set her down easily, crouching himself, and did not take his hands away.
It's been a long time, he thought and she was responding! Whether she knew it or not, there was a
drowsy smile
on her face and her body moved a little against his hands, pleasurably. She was breathing harder.
Ross did the sensible thing and kissed her.
Wildcat!
Ross reeled back from her fright and anger, his face copiously scratched. "I'm dreadfully sorry,"
he sputtered. "Please accept my sincerest "
The flare-up of rage ended; she was sobbing bitterly, leaning against the wall, wailing that
nobody had ever treated her like that before, that she'd be set back three years if he told
anybody, that she was a good, self-controlled girl and he had no right to treat her that way, and
what kind of degenerate was he, not yet twenty and going around kissing girls when everybody knew
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you went crazy from it.
He soothed her from a distance. Her sobbing dropped to a bilious croon as she climbed the ladder
to the yellow vat, tears still on her face, and checked its temperature.
Ross, wondering if he were already crazy from too much kissing of girls, mechanically resumed his
duties. But she had responded. And how long had they been working? And wasn't this shift ever
going to end?
All the shifts ended in lime. But there was a catch to it: There was always another shift. After
the afternoon shift on the dye vats came dinner porridge! and then came the evening shift on the
dye vats, and then sleep. The foreman was lenient, though; he let Ross off the vats after the end
of the second day. Then it was kitchen orderly, and only two shifts a day. And besides, you got
plenty to eat.
But it was a long, long way, Ross thought sardonically to himself, from the shining pictures he
had painted to himself back on Halsey's Planet. Ross the explorer, Ross the hero, Ross the savior
of humanity. . . .
Ross, the semipermanent KP.
He had to admit it to himself: The expedition thus far had been a bust. Not only was it perfectly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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